Angiodysplasia

These are tangles of vessels, bright red and showing arborisation — branching like the boughs of a tree — seen in or beneath the lining anywhere in the digestive system. They can sometimes lie behind unexplained bleeding from the digestive system. The diagnosis is made by endoscopy.

If they cause unexplained iron-deficiency anaemia and no other cause can be found, or if they are identified during endoscopy as the source of bleeding, thermocoagulation with a heater probe or with laser is used as treatment.

In the first two pictures below you see angiodysplasia in the large bowel, and in the last three pictures angiodysplasia seen in the stomach.